We left by 9 am and rolled out of town in the orange glow of an autumn morning, heading west. We crossed the Missouri River, passing a flatbed truck piled high with hay bales. The fields on the west side of the river that divides North Dakota in two were the bright gold of early fall. Tall, fat jellyrolls of hay dotted the landscape, topping small hills or set in glacial depressions, like they had become stuck there. The sky above us was blue, blue, blue, except for the little puffs of white cloud here and there. Rolling yellow hills for miles and miles and the hard road in front of us.
We turned off the interstate at Beulah and the road
rollercoastered onward. Sunflowers, dry, hanging their black heads in droves
along the road, their leaves drooping as though they’d just missed out on
something big.
To the left of the road was an old red barn, with white
letters that announced ‘The Ideal Farm.’ It certainly looked ideal, tucked into
a hillside. A white, broad front porch and a window nested in the eaves – maybe
from the 1920s? Trees shaded the yard, their leaves turning from summer green
to yellow, and a pond curled around the property, tapering towards a cottonwood.
A black bull lay warming itself in the morning sun, lines of muscle visible beneath
its skin. Up and then down a sharp hill, we went into Beulah – coal mining
country, power plant country, cowboy country.
Main Street Beulah is full of shops, bustling with cars and
pedestrians, a sure sign of a town untouched by big box stores or shopping
malls. Two cars in a row had dogs that stuck their heads out of windows to woof
at passers-by. A sign of the nearby oil boom, once empty lots now hold RVs, an
occasional Airstream trailer, sometimes a real honest-to-goodness trailer.
At the Country Kettle restaurant downtown, a help wanted
sign sat in the window. Concrete grain silos ten stories high loomed over the
road. The train tracks sit behind it, and the trains rumbling through town send
vibrations that move right up through your legs and shake the bones in your
chest. Inside the café, the tables were
nearly full. A grey-haired man sat in the sunshine with two white-haired
people. His t-shirt boasted ‘oil field scum.’ His narrow face was deeply lined
and he let out a curse word or two at considerable volume. At the next table, a
young woman cradled a sleeping newborn. The waitress left a carafe on my table –
the coffee was good and strong. I drank it black and eavesdropped as people
leaned across tables to talk.
“How many grandchildren do you have now? Is it fifteen?”
“Well, I sure hurt my hand bowling last week. Look at that finger! It didn't always bend that way.”
“The special today is fleischkeuchle. It’s a steak wrapped
in pastry and fried. People around here like it. It’s different.”
“What do you hear from your mom these days?”
“Well, my Vernon, he’s a picky one. He eats toast, French
fries, chips… oh, and steak, of course, and ribs…”
After three cups of coffee, a walk around town brought me to
flat fronted shops. I wandered around a bit in a dollar store that stocked
tomatoes, zucchini and squash, piled on the floor beneath the 99c greeting
cards.
An old car dealership sits crumbling at the end of Main Street, just before
the houses start lining the road. A Chevrolet sign is still out front, and concrete
parapets on the roof spell out Oldsmobile. Inside, it looks as though dripping
water has ruined the roof and ceiling, caused the tiles to drop down onto the
showroom floor, where they sit, crumpled from the fall, next to an old maroon
sofa and chair. In front of the plate glass window, a dead bird lays on its
back, drying in the sun.
The husband’s interview, the reason we came to town, lasted for two hours, and I spent
the time walking around Beulah’s dusty streets, over the train tracks, past the
new gas station and houses with neatly trimmed lawns. One house looked the way
my neighborhood in Bismarck used to – an old bungalow with a huge elm tree
arching its branches over the yard, a layer of dust covering the steps, and an
old wire fence tracing its way around the property line. Old Dakota style,
maybe a hundred years old, and it made me miss the houses that stood where the
hospital parking lots are now.
Once we got on the road (after stopping for knoephla soup in
a tiny café near the highway), I kept noticing the dust. It went from yellowish
brown to scoria red pretty quickly. We rolled past Dickinson and the natural
gas flares burning next to the highway. We saw oil rigs nodding on farmland,
trucks and semis barreling past, a huge metal sculpture of geese over a sunset.
As we aimed westward, the landscape changed from rolling farmland to the cut
lines of buttes striped with black lignite coal, bluish gray bentonite, yellow
and red scoria.
Why the romance of heading west? Don’t you feel it when you
hit the road, heading west from anywhere? Maybe it’s all tied up in old western
movies, in the line ‘go west, young man,’ in the idea that the frontier is
still out there, dusty and wild and free. I even felt that way whenever heading
west in Ireland –to Kerry, Galway, Connemara or Donegal – a surge of excitement
in the chest: a feeling that, as the landscape becomes more rugged, so do I.